Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725–1970

Inmates and Environments

Jane Hamlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317320258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

The essays in this collection explore both organizational intentions and inhabitants' experiences in a diverse range of British residential institutions during a period when such provision was dramatically increasing.

1 Viewing the EarlyTwentieth-Century Institutional Interior through the Pages of LivingLondon

Fiona Fisher

DOI: 10.4324/9781315654836-1

Living London: A Window on the Institutional Interior

This chapter examines the photographic representation of a range of residentialinstitutions within a collection of early twentieth-century writings,Living London: Its Work and its Play, its Humour and its Pathos, itsSights and its Scenes, edited by George R. Sims and published byCassell & Company between 1902 and 1903. The collection made a variety ofurban environments visible to a contemporary readership for the first time andoffers an opportunity to look across institutional sites and typologies to explorecommon aspects of their spatial, material and aesthetic organization, their statusas dwelling places, and their relationship with an idealized domesticity, rootedin an understanding of the home as a moral centre for family life and a foundationof social stability. Drawing on a selection of images, it considers the visualevidence that Living London’s photographs offer for arelationship between the design of institutional interiors and those of privatehomes of the period, as well as the ways in which domestic ideals informed therepresentational choices of the collection’s photographers and editor.

Living London, an ambitious attempt to record the panoply ofmetropolitan social experience at the start of the twentieth century, incorporated175 articles and somewhere in the region of 1,500 photographs and otherillustrations. The series was published fortnightly at a cost of 7 pence and inthree bound volumes that sold for 12 shillings each, making it affordable to amiddle-class audience and almost certainly available to a wider working-classreadership.¹ In the prologue to the opening volume Sims set out the editorial aims ofthe publication:

The history of London has been written, the story of its streets has beentold, again and again. But the life of London in all its phases and aspectshas never until now been exhaustively attempted … With pen and pencil, withcamera and snapshot, those who are associated with this work have laid everyphase of London life under contribution. Wherever photography has been practicable ithas been relied upon, because no other process of reproduction is at once soactual and so convincing.²

Sims’s desire to record London life resonates with the aims of a range of latenineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary and journalistic investigationsinto the city and Keith Wilson has suggested that the volumes occupy an‘intergeneric ground on which journalism, social documentary and popularliterature meet’.³ The three Living London volumes are also exactlycontemporary with the final seventeen-part edition of Charles Booth’s socialsurvey of London, published as Life and Labour of the People inLondon – a correspondence that perhaps suggests that its publishersenvisaged the collection as a popular analogue to Booth’s study.⁴ In its highly visual approach to the presentation and narration of citylife Living London shares certain characteristics of the urbanphotographic survey.⁵ The collection can also be situated within the context of a shift innineteenth-century visual culture, characterized by new modes of representationand observation and by the production and privileging of new forms of visualknowledge.⁶

Although images of street and outdoor life dominate the collection, LivingLondon’s volumes also incorporate a variety of interior scenes andprovide an important source of information on turn-of-the-century London’sdomestic and public interiors, their furnishing and decoration. Approximately athird of the total visual content of the volumes – photographs and illustrations –is devoted to interior spaces, with photographs accounting for around a fifth ofthat total. The collection is novel in its juxtaposition of elite, middle- andworking-class interiors and in the range of interior spaces depicted, whichinclude sites of urban recreation, private dwellings and commercial, charitable,public and institutional buildings. Among the residential institutionsincorporated are prisons, lodging houses for the poor, workhouses, orphanages,lunatic asylums, charitable shelters and homes for immigrants. These range frombuildings of modest scale, designed to accommodate a small number of occupants, tolarge, multi-functional sites of mass occupation that housed several hundred.Certain categories of institutional space, notably environments designed forsleeping, food preparation and eating, work and recreation, are widely representedand this suggests a particular interest in their social use that informs thediscussion here. Most of the interiors depicted were designed for use byworking-class staff or residents. Although many of these were intended forcommunal use by single-sex groups, the collection also includes a number of spacesdesigned for individual occupation and some for occupation by couples or children.There is little visual evidence of accommodation for nuclear or extended familyunits, however, at least one of the establishments – Stockwell Orphanage –employed the concept of family as a social model for institutional living.

Through the medium of photography Sims aimed to reveal ‘the Londoner in his habitas he lives … in all his moods and amid all his environments’.⁷ Under-pinning that aimwas a belief in the affective potential of architectural design and an interest inthe ways in which Londoners shaped and were shaped by their environments. Inkeeping with Sims’s aim to capture ‘every phase of London life’, and in contrastto the spatial and aesthetic emphasis of architectural photography, most ofLiving London’s images of institutional interiors arepopulated. As David MacDougall has observed:

Framing people, objects, and events with a camera is always ‘about’something. It is a way of pointing out, of describing, of judging. Itdomesticates and organizes vision. It both enlarges and diminishes. Itdiminishes by leaving out those connections in life to which thephotographer is blind, as when it imposes an explanation on events that weknow to be more complex. Or it does this as a deliberate sacrifice to someseemingly more important argument or dramatic effect. Framing enlargesthrough a similar process. It is what lifts something out of its backgroundin order to look at it more closely, as we might pick up a leaf in theforest.⁸

The ability of photography to elicit social responses or performances from itssubjects places limitations on its exclusive use as a source of historicalevidence for the lived environment, as does its tendency to omit or obscurecertain spaces and social practices – the bathrooms and washing facilities ofLondon’s residential institutions are, for example, a revealing blind spot in theLiving London collection. Nevertheless, certain common themesemerge from an examination of the diverse social settings represented and thesecan help further understanding of the complex relationship that residentialinstitutions maintained with the home, as well as the gendered and classed idealsthat informed their design and shaped their contemporary meanings.

The domestic interior has been understood as an important site of identityformation and performance, which was central to the emergence and consolidation ofgender and class identities from the late eighteenth century onwards.⁹ Studies of later nineteenth-century domesticity have demonstrated thesignificant role that the widening availability of manufactured goods played inallowing middle- and working-class individuals to participate in a world ofconsumption and to express their identities through modes of dress and through thefurnishing and decoration of their homes and the display of goods withinthem.¹⁰ Viewed from an architectural perspective, the development of thenineteenth-century home was, as Lynne Walker has indicated, a process throughwhich

dominant middle-class beliefs about ‘proper’ social relationships and thedifferent roles and capacities of men and women in culture and society werecoded (architecturally and linguistically) and built into the fabric of thehome through the two essential elements of Victorian planning, segregationand specialization.¹¹

Victorian middle-class domesticity was, as has been well-documented, culturallypervasive and not only informed attitudes towards the working-class home and itsimprovement, but also influenced the design and representation of late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century commercial interiors aimed at men and women of differentclasses, such as those of public houses and department stores, examples of whichcan also be found in the Living London volumes.¹²

Privacy and Regulation

Living London’s photographs suggest that domestic ideals,expressed in generic and site-specific visual, material and spatial forms, alsoinformed the design and representation of institutional interiors. At London’sRowton Houses, which Jane Hamlett and Rebecca Preston discuss in greater detail inChapter 6 ofthis volume,turnstiles established the entrances to the buildings as spaces through which thepassage of individuals was carefully regulated and closely monitored. Originallydesigned to inhibit the movement of livestock, turnstiles made their transitionfrom exterior to interior in the second half of the nineteenth century, when theybegan to be employed to regulate human traffic in sites such as museums, fairs andsports stadia. Laurent Stalder has suggested that threshold architectures of thistype highlight ‘performative aspects’ of the built environment, or the ways inwhich the fabric of a building operates on users to regulate and shape theirbodies and movements.¹³ As Hamlett and Preston describe, Lord Rowton wished to create a homelyatmosphere and for that reason preferred that Rowton Houses be managed with ‘aminimum of regulation’ (see p. 99). Although anti-domestic in its authoritariandimensions, the entrance turnstile defined the interior as a discrete socialsetting, replacing the entrance rituals of the private dwelling with a commercialexchange and physical transition that operated as a defence against the unwantedand guaranteed a degree of residential security and privacy to Rowton’sresidents.¹⁴Living London’s photograph of the entrance hall of the RowtonHouse in Hammersmith offered readers a view through the turnstiles to alight-filled oasis of potted plants and seated figures – a tableau of relaxedambience that hinted at the comfort and freedom available to those admittedaccess.

Within the body of sociological writing that theorizes behaviour and environment,privacy is understood as a universal need, central to the construction of self andgroup identity, to the mediation of social relations, and to the display of statusand functioning of power.¹⁵ Irwin Altman has suggested that Western cultures place a strong emphasison the use of physical barriers as privacy mechanisms.¹⁶ Other photographs in the collection evidence a number of common forms ofinterior spatial planning, furniture types and furniture groupings, such ascubicle, dormitory and refectory layouts, which spanned institutional typologies.These determined the physical possibilities for social withdrawal or engagementwithin different institutional settings and suggest that the design and furnishingof the interior was not only informed by regulatory concerns, but also theperceived privacy requirements of users. Photographs of kitchens and dining rooms,for example, indicate that long communal tables were gener-ally favoured for these spaces.¹⁷ The refectory table was not only a practical form of furnishing formass-occupancy institutional environments, but also reflects an understanding ofthe communality of working-class life that informed the design of public diningspaces. This is most evident in the case of sites frequented by the urban poor,whose shared seating arrangements can be contrasted with the ‘private’ model ofindividual tables employed by businesses aimed at a respectable middle- andworking-class custom.¹⁸

Living London’s photographs of sleeping environments offerfurther indication of the ways in which the design and furnishing of the interiorregulated social life within different institutional settings. The collectionrepresents a variety of accommodation including cubicles for individuals andcouples and communal sleeping areas, such as shared bedrooms, open-plan andpartitioned dormitories, some of which also functioned as day rooms. Certaincommon furnishing elements can also be found in these environments; ironbedsteads, for example, which were a feature of many institutional interiors fromthe first half of the nineteenth century, appear in a number of images includingone of a dormitory at the Alexandra Orphanage in Hornsey Rise and one of aninfirmary at Holloway Prison.¹⁹ The latter, a sparsely furnished and unornamented interior, designed onsanitary principles, can be contrasted with other images of dormitory-styleaccommodation that appear in the collection, in which pictures, plants anddecorative t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Viewing the EarlyTwentieth-Century Institutional Interior through the Pages of LivingLondon
• 2 ‘French Beef Was Better thanHampstead Beef’: Taste, Treatment and Pauperism in a London Smallpox Hospital,1871
• 3 From Asylum to Mental Hospital:Gender, Space and the Patient Experience in London County Council Asylums,1890–1910
• 4 Refuge or Prison? Girls'Experiences of a Home for the ‘Mentally Defective' in Scotland, 1906–1948
• 5 Paupers and Their Experience ofa London Workhouse: St Martin-in-the-Fields, 1725–1824
• 6 ‘A Veritable Palace for theHardworking Labourer?’ Space, Material Culture and Inmate Experience in London'sRowton Houses, 1892–1918
• 7 ‘The Place Was a Home FromHome’: Identity and Belonging in the English Cottage Home for ConvalescingPsychiatric Patients, 1910–1939
• 8 ‘The Father and Mother of thePlace’: Inhabiting London's Public Libraries, 1885–1940
• 9 ‘Discipline with Home-LikeConditions’: The Living Quarters and Daily Life of the Women's Army AuxiliaryCorps in First-World-War Britain and France
• 10 Halls of Residence atBritain's Civic Universities, 1870–1970
• Notes
• Index